When he was fifteen Fabian saw the film The 39 Steps, which had just come out. He liked to say that this film was a turning-point in his life. It was an epiphany for him. As he left the cinema he knew that he wanted to make films. It is likely that this is an embroidery of the truth, a constructed narrative to suit the persona he desired to project. There is nothing true about Fabian. True or not, he began to develop an interest in films at that time. He was familiar with John Buchan’s book The Thirty-Nine Steps and was fascinated by how Alfred Hitchcock had turned it into a film. The letters in the title had become numbers. He saw this as an example of the artistic benefits of technology, and the gears of his ambition were engaged. He was to become a film director. Fabian knew nothing about film making but that did not discourage him. His patience was unlimited. He did not care how long it took. It would in fact be only six years before he found himself looking out from behind a camera—sooner than he had expected.
 
He kept his new ambition to himself. His parents would not have approved. Arthur Davis thought a career in accounting, or ideally a position in The Civil Service was the obvious direction he should take. His mother Virginia didn’t care but would not have approved of anything he said he wanted to do. So he spent the next six years plotting and trying to teach himself about film making, which meant reading everything he could get his hands on about the subject, which was not much. Later he was influenced by Eisenstein’s Film Form and Film Sense. He also went to the cinema as much as he could, sometimes going back to see the same film many times. He found that with multiple viewings his initial emotional involvement fell away leaving him able to dispassionately observe how the film was put together.
 
Ironically he would have made a good accountant or civil servant. He had the brain and temperament for it, as Mercury in Capricorn conjunct to the Moon makes clear. But these influences were offset by both Neptune and Jupiter in Leo in the Eighth House, which among other things suggest an affinity for arts and entertainment.
 
At university he got involved with the theatre and when he became friends with Helen, a fellow student, she introduced him to the films of Dali and Bunuel—L’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou. Helen was interested in Modern Art. Most of it was happening across the Channel in Paris at the time. They talked about going there. The Bunuel-Dalí films opened up a new realm of possibilities for Fabian, widening his awareness of what he could do and taking him beyond the dramas of suspense that had enthralled him. Portraying life as a dream-state made all kinds of directions possible. He still liked suspense but realised that it did not have to be rooted in an orthodox perception of reality. The surrealist films were not particularly suspenseful, relying more on the strategy of shock. The images of the blade across the eyeball, the donkey hauling the piano and the ants crawling from a wounded palm were shocking indeed, but they also struck him as brittle in a way. They did not have the depth or irony of drama. Shock always requires more shock as the audience becomes inured to it, and is therefore ultimately unfulfilling. He also felt there was a certain self-righteousness to these films, as if the director assumed he knew better, or more, than other people. Fabian suspected that no one really knew anything. There was no room for self-righteousness in the world. It was a piece of wisdom one might normally have associated with an older person. Luis Bunuel might have been shocked himself, to find his films appreciated by the sequacious bourgeoisie he was trying to insult.
 
As the stars have shown, Fabian was very focused and ambitious. He knew what he wanted and pursued it with tact but without compromise, though he never assumed that his ideas were the only valid or correct ones. They pertained to himself. Other people had just the same right to their different opinions as he did.
 
One evening at a pub in Cambridge he was involved in a conversation about the theory of relativity. Simon Beale was reading physics and took it on himself to explain Einstein’s theory to a gaggle of would-be thespians and literature students. Simon was enjoying his position of superior knowledge but he was also a good teacher. Despite his clear explanations, most of what he said went over Fabian’s head, except for one phrase—‘extended present’. The juxtaposition of those two words excited him without even knowing what was meant and he perked up. Before that he had been distracted by a game of shove ha’penny. He had been trying to think of all the different names for the ancient game: shoffe-groat, shovilla-bourde, slide thrift, slype-grote and then—‘extended present’. His attention had snapped back.
 
Simon Beale continued with his lecture.
 
“Most people understand time as what has happened, what is happening now and what will happen—past, present, and future. But Einstein’s special theory of relativity shows that this is not the case. There is an intermediate state, neither past nor future—the extended present. Its duration increases with distance from the observer. At close up, that duration is so short it cannot be perceived by human senses. But if you were to observe an event in a precise moment of time from the Moon, the extended present would last a few seconds and if you went further out to Mars, it would be fifteen minutes. So in this moment that you think of as NOW, some things would have already happened and others would be yet to come. A moment cannot be objectively perceived or described.”
 
Fabian was floored. There is no such thing as now. That is the way he saw it. The realisation was thrilling. It had the ring of poetry and stayed with him always. No sooner had it sunk in than he began to explore ways he could use the idea.
 
In a general sense film suggested a linear progression of time. Footage of celluloid passed from one spool to another, in camera and projector, each frame moving sequentially through the gate. There was no movement of the images themselves. Only the medium that contained the still images moved. It was an archaic trick like the zoetrope. It seemed a crude mechanism when compared to the concept of the extended present. If one slowed, or stopped the film running through the projector, causing the film to melt and the screen to portray bubbling celluloid, could that represent the extended present? Not really. It might be better achieved by having two actors experience a different duration of the same scene. He could imagine filming an actor who sat in a cinema watching the screen on which he was portrayed sitting in the cinema and watching the screen but that was more Escher than extended present. It was a difficult concept to express visually.
 
In the future the process of film making would be much more sophisticated. Celluloid would no longer be needed. The images themselves might move, just like reality. Cameras would be no different than eyes. They would have perception. He was naturally inclined to technology and things mechanical, as Uranus in the second house and Mars in the ninth might attest.
 
Fabian grew up in turbulent times, as does everyone because all times are turbulent. The only modifier being one’s proximity to a turbulent zone and its intensity. As the motions toward war began to fester in Europe, he was enjoying himself at university. It was probably the first protracted period of enjoyment in his life, a newfound liberty from the drabness and solitude of his childhood, which up until then he had considered the normal state of affairs. He had only lived a fraction of his life—most of it was still ahead of him. Hope and excitement were a matter of course.
 
So Fabian was not unduly concerned with the impending war. He had been relatively unscathed by the Great Depression due to his father’s dry but steady employment in the mid to upper rungs of the Civil Service.
 
It was perhaps due to his father’s irrational and implacable hatred of the Irish that he immersed himself in the tales of Irish myth, the stories of Cuchulainn being his favourite.
 
Cuchulainn was born with the name Sétanta. His mother was Deichtine, the sister or daughter of Conchobar Mac Nessa, the king of Ulster. His father was the god Lugh. There are different versions of the story of his birth. They all involve a group of Ulster men out hunting for magical birds when they are forced to take shelter from a sudden snowstorm. In one version Deichtine rides with them, in another she is the wife of the man who hosts them for the night, presumably the god Lugh. Either way, she becomes pregnant and gives birth to Sétanta.
 
What immediately strikes me about this are the magical birds—the common thread between the different versions. They become a metaphor, just hinted at, an undercurrent of birds. It makes me think there should be subterranean stories written beneath this one, like a succession of ancient cities that lie beneath each other, deeper and deeper into the past. It would be built from symbols rather than words. Images of birds perhaps.
 
Those birds would have to fly at such a great depth, that they would barely be noticeable. How would they connect with the story on the surface? It would have to be a courtship, playful and coy. The different stories must desire each other.
 
Chulainn was a smith whose house was guarded by a ferocious dog. Sétanta killed it in self-defence and when Chulainn was upset about it, Sétanta had to take its place until a suitable canine replacement could be found. Thenceforth, he was known as Cuchulainn—Chulainn’s hound. He had black hair. In other versions of the story he was blond, or had hair which was brown, red and yellow in different layers. Fabian liked to think of him with dark hair. He had black hair himself and piercing blue eyes, like a Siberian Husky. People found them shocking to look at, attractive yet vaguely repellent. One’s gaze kept returning to them, along with the desire to look away. Fabian’s eyes gave him an edge.
 
He had other similarities with the hero. Both were handsome, diminutive in stature, boyish in appearance, beardless, and had many lovers. Cuchulainn was renowned for his extreme battle frenzy. The tendons in his neck would bunch up into great knots bigger than babies’ heads. One eye would come out of its socket and rest on his cheek, the other would be sucked back into his skull. His lungs and kidneys were visible in his throat. He would kill everything in sight, friend or foe. It made no difference. It took scores of women baring their breasts in front of him to distract him long enough to allow the other men to cool him off in successive barrels of water.
 
This was where their similarities ceased. When Fabian was at school he had to do mandatory military training in the cadet forces for several hours each Wednesday afternoon. Every now and then, that meant bayonet practice. The boys would be lined up on the edge of a field. When the command to fix bayonets came, they twisted their mean seventeen-inch blades onto the ends of their rifles in the prescribed manner and stood at attention. Then one-at-a-time they would be called upon to run twenty yards across the field towards an upright bale of hay. They were instructed to emit blood curdling screams as they ran. When they reached the target they would thrust the bayonet into the bale, twist it to the right and left, then putting a foot against the hay-belly they would pull out the blade and run back.
 
Despite his best efforts, Fabian’s blood curdling screams were never more than whimpers. He was not to be a hero. This was the result of Mars in Libra. He hated confrontation and always fell back on persuasion and tact to further his aims.
 
The Irish stories offered him relief from Graeco-Roman thought. The Romans never reached Ireland. Irish logic was different from Roman logic. It had been mitigated by Christian missionaries perhaps, but had still managed to maintain some independence. He was skeptical of such opinions even when they were his own. They would have to be proven true and the proofs required for that would have to be proven themselves, and so on, a never ending requirement of proof.
 
This is an example of the regressive argument in epistemology. It is one part of the Münchausen trilemma, which seeks to demonstrate the impossibility of proving any truth. The other two parts of the trilemma are circular argument and dogmatic argument.
 
Despite his grace and intelligence, Fabian was so private about his inner feelings, even to himself, that it was almost as if he didn’t have any. It would take years for him to open up. But that kind of extreme reserve was cultural for a man of his time and class, raised in an all male boarding school. 
 
The famous exchange between Lord Uxbridge and The Duke of Wellington at the moment that Uxbridge was hit in the leg by a cannon shot, sums it up perfectly even if it never happened: "By Gad, sir, I've lost my leg!” says Uxbridge. Wellington replies "By Gad, sir, so you have!" 
 
The amputated limb became a tourist attraction in the village of Waterloo in Belgium.
 
 

© Tom Newton 2025.
 
This is an excerpt from the novel Fabian: a Cubist Biography by Tom Newton, Recital Publishing 2025.