Works
Lay's early prints show some debt to the manner of Aubrey Beardsley, but during the 1920s and 1930s he developed a distinctively deco manner, producing a considerable series of oils depicting family groups or pairs of characteristic Suffolk vernacular types in a pseudo-naive style and in vibrant colour. In his watercolours, landscapes are populated in less formal, more relaxed ways.
Lay's volumes of poems appeared mainly between 1927 and 1934. They are mainly collections of short lyrics in new Elizabethan manner, sometimes erotic, and, although rural and showing a countryman's sensibilities, without sentimentalism or any strong note of nostalgia. Cecil Lay married Joan Chadburn, daughter of the painter Haworth Chadburn, in 1932. 'His origins, training and experience seem as if designed to produce that complex of rootedness and spiritual uprootedness that so often gives the artist's special oblique angle of view.' National Press opinions of his early verse comment on his Elizabethan frankness, simplicity, admirable lyrical impulse combined with tigerish intensity and focus, wit, beauty and blunt realism. His romantic sensibility was blended or moderated with classic restraint.
He was a friend of the Sieveking family and, although a project (by Martin Secker) to publish his collected poems had foundered in 1937, the broadcaster Lance Sieveking in 1962 published a Collected Poems of Cecil Lay with his own Introduction, and an extended quotation from an earlier Introduction intended for the original Secker volume of 1937, written by A. E. Coppard. Not only Coppard, but also Middleton Murry, Desmond MacCarthy and W. H. Davies had been attracted to Lay's poetry, and Lance Sieveking emphasised the ways in which the poems resembled those of W. H. Davies.
Read more about this topic: Cecil Howard Lay
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“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
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“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute..”
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