In his Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft gave a thumbnail sketch of the "typical protagonist" in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's hero "is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore, darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe" (p. 59). Needless to say, Lovecraft appropriated the same model for many of his own doomed heroes. Some have suggested, with apparent justification, that HPL even adopted this persona as his own personal role model. In any case, we would like to develop the possibility that the qualities listed by Lovecraft have often combined in weird fiction, his own and others', to form the picture of what we would nowadays call the "pseudo-intellectual".

The general outlines of the pseudo-intellectual are supplied by L. Sprague deCamp in his controversial biography of Lovecraft. Without venturing to comment upon the applicability of his portrait to Lovecraft himself, we reproduce DeCamp's description as our working paradigm. "Although erudite, [the pseudo-intellectual is] wont to pontificate on subjects of which he ha[s] the merest literary smattering, without the correctives of firsthand knowledge or worldly experience. [There is] instilled in him 'that haste to form judgments and that lack of critical sense in testing them, which are often the result of self-education conducted by immense and unsystematic reading.'" [p. 103.] If weird fiction makes extensive use of characters matching this description, we may suggest three principal reasons for it.

First, weird fiction may feature pseudo-intellectuals prominently though unwittingly, because it is written by them. Let us recall DeCamp's mention of a broad but shallow and lopsided program of self-education. We may think of the limited educational opportunities available to Robert E. Howard. His minor tale "The Children of the Night" is memorable, if at all, for its repulsive racist fanaticism. (Get a load of this: "And as my ancestors . . . destroyed the scum that writhed beneath our heels, so shall I . . . exterminate the reptilian thing, the monster bred of the snaky taint that slumbered so long unguessed in clean Saxon veins.") This story opens amid a stifling exchange of pontifications among a clique of stuffed-shirts and dilettantes. Wearying speeches about the skull-types of Aryan and other races are fired back and forth. There is little doubt that Howard, like Lovecraft, personally embraced such propaganda-masquerading-as-anthropology (for the roots of which, see Poliakov, The Aryan Myth).

Or take Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone, where the main character champions such offbeat hobbyhorses as "vitalist" (or "teleological") evolutionism and the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Wilson has often been vilified up and down for his wide-but-weird self-education and the skewed perspectives issuing from it. As Clifford Bendeau (Colin Wilson: The Outsider and Beyond) has contended, most of this criticism stems merely from critics' irritability and ruffled sensibilities, but such criticisms are at least occasioned by these eccentric pet-theories.

Second, we must ask if pseudo-intellectuals do not infest the pages of weird fiction so as to cater to its "fans", many of whom may never have passed intellectual adolescence. ("Physician heal thyself," you say? Touche.) On a fairly superficial level, this is almost certainly true. For example, returning to Howard's "The Children of the Night", the narrator describes the setting as a "bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books. . . ." These "shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety." Specifically, "you'll find there a number of delectable dishes --- Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin --- look, there's a rare feast --- Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse --- the real Eighteenth Century edition." This kind of literary name-dropping and collecting-mania is of course a hobby passionately enjoyed by most of our readers, as well as the present writer. And whether we have derived this predilection from weird fiction, or whether the influence runs the other way, is a moot point. It is, safe to say, one of those famous chicken-and-egg problems.

But on a more serious level, we may suspect that writers in the macabre tradition are playing up to the delusions of certain immature cranks among their audience. For instance, in Frank Belknap Long's story "The Hounds of Tindalos", the main character Chalmers facilely dismisses Darwin and Bertrand Russell in favor of medieval alchemy. The narrator chides him; "'You have always scoffed at modern science,' I said, a little impatiently." No doubt the eccentric Chalmers has felt the sting of such skepticism before, but this time he will be vindicated. And of course, by the end of the story, he wishes he hadn't been! At any rate, we hear here the chorus of celluloid mad-scientists intoning, "The blind fools! I'll show them all!" No doubt many readers vicariously relish the same vindication in the face of parents and junior-high teachers who are blind to their tightly-clutched truths of UFOs and lost continents.

Our third reason is by no means exclusive of the second, though it probably does exclude the first. Pseudo-intellectuals loom large in weird fiction because their beliefs are often presupposed in the structure of the stories. We refer to what might be called the "crackpot cosmology", including magic, miracles, and sunken continents like Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Hyperborea (and New Jersey? Well, one can only wish. . . .). For instance, in August Derleth's The Lurker at the Threshold, Dr. Seneca Lapham expresses his credence in "a very large, though usually suppressed, body of occurrences antipodally contradictory to the total scientific knowledge of mankind . . . some of which have been collected and chronicled in two remarkable books by . . . Charles Fort --- The Book of the Damned and New Lands --- I commend them to your attention."

While the use of racist anthropology by Howard and Lovecraft reflected their own erroneous beliefs, the presence of these other, equally baseless, notions serves quite a different function. Quack beliefs are handy symbols for that awful cosmic otherness and threatening meaninglessness that Lovecraft deemed the true horror. He himself scorned supernaturalism and occultism and wisely noted that of all people, materialists and skeptics were best suited to write weird fiction. Who would feel more horror if the trusted laws of nature were suddenly to bend and break? Not the believer in the occult! If Nyarlathotep should peer into his window, so what? Last week it was Godzilla.

So the chill of supernatural horror written by naturalists lies in how chagrined, nay terrified, they would be if the cranks and pseudo-intellectuals turned out to be right after all! A good example of this concerns a classic pseudo-intellectual jerk to whom deceptively sidelong reference is made in "Pickman's Model": "Reid, you know, had just taken up comparative pathology, and was full of pompous. inside stuff about the biological or evolutionary significance of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him toward the last --- that the fellow's features and expression were slowly developing in a way . . . that wasn't human." But it is this smartass dilettante who turns out to have been closest to the devolutionary truth --- Pickman was in fact a "ghoul-changeling" who had begun to revert to type.

In conclusion, we have considered the possibility that weird fiction often features pseudo-intellectual characters because the writers themselves sometimes fall into this category (at least relative to this or that given issue). We also suggested that the goal might be to cater to the adolescent cranks in the reading audience. Such readers could hold Lovecraft in one hand and Colonel Churchward in the other, imagining that the former vindicated a belief in the latter. But the last laugh is on such a reader; the apparent championing of eccentric beliefs in weird stories tends in exactly the opposite direction. The greatest astonishment, the wildest fantasy imaginable would be for such pseudo-intellectual clap-trap to be true!