Fort Belvedere, interior as decorated for Edward VIII, (afterward the Duke of Windsor)
by Herman Schrijver (1904 - 1972)

While you were watching the Oscars, I was finishing Charles Burkhart's Herman & Nancy & Ivy (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1977) which I had eagerly awaited and which had just arrived in the weekend mail.   I was so looking forward to learning more about Herman Schrijver, Dutch-born bon vivant and decorator to so many interesting people including "Ernest Simpson, more than one of Ernest's wives (including Wallis), the King, assorted Guinnesses and Kesslers, Lord Stonehaven and Dame Marie Tempest." (p. 33).  

Herman was also great friends, oddly enough, with Nancy Cunard and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and the point of the book Herman & Nancy & Ivy I think is to elaborate on just exactly how one person can have such different sorts of friends.  Nancy, as you know, is famous today for the Beaton portrait of her wearing lots of ivory bracelets; she was also tireless in her work on behalf of various causes and was sexually insatiable.  Understandably, Nancy was not especially fond of the novelist Ivy who was sexually almost certainly the very opposite of Nancy and seemingly uninterested in any causes.  One would be hard-pressed I think, to find two more different women, but both were friends of Herman.  

"If you have a personality," Herman wrote, "this must be expressed and recognized in all your rooms, in every corner of your house.  If you don't have a personality steal or borrow one from the people you like or admire most."  In an interview with Herman In a Cape Town newpaper in August 1936 he tells us that "King Edward likes clean, bright colours and colour contrasts, and he is fond of red and yellows.  The walls of most of his apartments at the Fort are painted white."  The question of course is whether the King really preferred this decorating scheme or borrowed it, perhaps from Wallis SImpson.   We may never know.  

Clearly, however, Herman was drawn to people with personalities, sometimes even people with fairly difficult ones.  Nancy was forever showing up chain-smoking and drunk, and Ivy always scraped the butter off the toast at tea.  Nancy almost never ate, and Ivy liked very simple, very plain English food.  Ivy, in fact, disliked people speaking anything but English in her presence and would demand a translation when someone spoke French.  Nancy, as Harold Acton told Duncan Fallowell (in To Noto, Bloomsbury 1989) "was an extraordinary woman.  She always had to have enormous black men plunging into her morning, noon and night."  As for Ivy, it is unclear whether her long-term relationship with the English furniture expert Margaret Jourdain with whom she lived for many years was ever physical.  Opinion is evenly divided.

Which I think proves the point that Herman preferred personality in rooms as well as friends. 

To be continued.