Before his death at only 48 in 2009, David Seabrook had produced two books. One of them, `All the Devils are Here’ (Granta, London, 2002) serves to some extent as an inspiration for this project on Kent Literature. A collection of essays about cultural history in the county, it devotes chapters to a mixture of Charles Dickens and his lingering, powerful, shaping influence on Rochester, T S Eliot and his characteristically ghostly descent in the early 1920s to Margate for a few days of recuperation, and the less well known example of the Victorian artist Richard Dadd, a native of Chatham, Kent, whose intense episodes of psychosis led him to murdering his father in Cobham. He was to spend much of the rest of his life in Broadmoor Hospital, Berkshire. Seabrook’s work also embraces the harrowing story of Charles Hawtrey, one of the stalwarts of the Carry On films franchise popular through the 1960s into the 1970s, whose final years in Deal saw a brutal decline into alcoholism and neglect.
This interest with the marginal, slightly decaying and deprived aspects of the formerly much more affluent and high profile Kent coastal towns in particular must have prompted his second book, `Jack of Jumps’ (Granta, 2006), even though that was firmly London based and tried to identify the Victorian serial murderer, Jack the Ripper. Seabrook’s life very seemed to echo some aspects of his work. A graduate of the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he did a Masters in the work of Marcel Proust, he lived at Station Road West, where his body was found by police in January 2009 after his family contacted them, worried they had not heard from him for some time. Despite a coroner report of no suspicious circumstances, speculation about why and how he died has continued.
The way that Seabrook’s small oeuvre of work segued between imaginative reconstruction of reality and his own life is perhaps the reason why it is tempting to see his personality and his death as being somehow as dramatic as the events he wrote of in his books. Neil Belton, his editor at Granta, writing almost a decade after his death, refers to the author’s uneasy, intense personality, and how it seemed to enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the place that Margate had become, long after its halcyon days as a genteel resort patronised by the likes of Eliot and, before him, the great J M W Turner. Just as the stark film, `Last Resort’ (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2001) had portrayed, Margate had become a front line – a place where newly arrived migrant communities lived, often uneasily, beside longer term residents, where there was high unemployment and, at the time, some of the worst economic depravation figures in England. Belton quotes Seabrook:
`‘There are hunched sedated souls lingering in cafes and souped-up milk bars. There are groups of squabbling Albanians outside. There are the young men of the front, this front, all bare arms, body art and fast-working furious faces, faces that ought to be spouting water from the walls of Gothic buildings.’ (`Kent Will Tear Us Apart’, 24th January 2018, https://granta.com/kent-will-tear-us-apart/)
Seabrook was not judgmental about this but adopted an almost admiring posture towards the rawness of the place. That is apparent in `All the Devils are Here’, which alienated as many readers as it attracted because of its almost melodramatic descriptions of the `live theatre’ of the town – something that owed a little to the work of Iain Sinclair and his travels around parts of London and its peripheries. Belton continues:
`David came up from Canterbury after I wrote to him again to say I wanted to publish his work. He looked the part: staring eyes, jittery, head shaved, gaunt. He wore a neat old Crombie and thrift shop clothes. He was nervous, as if he’d gotten out of the habit of being around people, talking in loud derisive gusts and laughing wildly at the absurdity of anyone taking Martin Amis or Ian McEwan seriously.’
But he also recognised his being `funny, sensitive and good company.’
Margate even since Seabrook’s time has undergone a transformation. Much of this is thanks to the Turner Contemporary gallery, opened in April 2011, which occupies one of the sites where the great artist, decades before, had stayed in a simple hostel and painted what he believed were some of the finest sky landscapes he had seen. Around the area, boutique shops, and stylish restaurants nestle beside remnants of the former era. Of these, the most iconic is perhaps the `Dreamland’ fun park, which is also now rejuvenated and rebranded. Even so, one suspects that the place Seabrook had glimpsed is still present. In the 2016 Referendum, despite receiving almost a million pounds of EU funding, the vote against continued membership of the Union was 64 per cent.