"Lewis was indeed a fascist." > A bit of a simplification; even Fredric Jameson would say so. This passage is also helpful:
"A very different way of understanding Lewis’s later allegiances and programs is to argue that he never quite believes in any position sufficiently to charge him with the consequences of that belief. Tyrus Miller’s pivotal study, Late Modernism (1999), does not bring us to the later Lewis, since he ends his Lewis chapter with the very beginning of the 1930s and The Apes of God, about which he writes: “Fascism for Lewis here, like femininity for Joan Riviere, appears as a masquerade—a costume, a set of signs to be deployed, an aesthetic construct extending theatrically into the political sphere” (Late Modernism, 116)."
Merely an awkward phrasing...I agree completely that Lewis's fascism was ephemeral and noncommittal, and I've written about this elsewhere. Alan Munton describes his political development as Left to Right to Left. Nonetheless, he does explicitly show support for fascism in 'The Art of Being Ruled', 'Left Wings over Europe' (which I'm currently editing) 'Count Your Dead, They Are Alive!', and in an article titled 'Left Wings and the C3 Mind' for the official newspaper of Oswald Mosely's British Union of Fascists. However, in my opinion, because he was fundamentally more self-aware than many of his European contemporaries, he was able exercise a degree of critical and philosophical self-reflection on his own implication in fascism. This is apparent in his second autobiography Rude Assignment when discussing Edouard Berthe and Julian Benda, and I would argue implicit in a novel such as The Vulgar Streak. But I don't think this passage you've quoted contradicts my observation here that Lewis understood fascism as an inherently aesthetic phenomena - what I describe as an 'ideological aesthetic.'
"Lewis was indeed a fascist." > A bit of a simplification; even Fredric Jameson would say so. This passage is also helpful:
"A very different way of understanding Lewis’s later allegiances and programs is to argue that he never quite believes in any position sufficiently to charge him with the consequences of that belief. Tyrus Miller’s pivotal study, Late Modernism (1999), does not bring us to the later Lewis, since he ends his Lewis chapter with the very beginning of the 1930s and The Apes of God, about which he writes: “Fascism for Lewis here, like femininity for Joan Riviere, appears as a masquerade—a costume, a set of signs to be deployed, an aesthetic construct extending theatrically into the political sphere” (Late Modernism, 116)."
Merely an awkward phrasing...I agree completely that Lewis's fascism was ephemeral and noncommittal, and I've written about this elsewhere. Alan Munton describes his political development as Left to Right to Left. Nonetheless, he does explicitly show support for fascism in 'The Art of Being Ruled', 'Left Wings over Europe' (which I'm currently editing) 'Count Your Dead, They Are Alive!', and in an article titled 'Left Wings and the C3 Mind' for the official newspaper of Oswald Mosely's British Union of Fascists. However, in my opinion, because he was fundamentally more self-aware than many of his European contemporaries, he was able exercise a degree of critical and philosophical self-reflection on his own implication in fascism. This is apparent in his second autobiography Rude Assignment when discussing Edouard Berthe and Julian Benda, and I would argue implicit in a novel such as The Vulgar Streak. But I don't think this passage you've quoted contradicts my observation here that Lewis understood fascism as an inherently aesthetic phenomena - what I describe as an 'ideological aesthetic.'