Look Back on Pat Holt and Golden Age of S.F. Chronicle Books

Steve's Blog on Writing

Pat Holt scared me a little, and she knew it. I started writing book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle more than a year before I joined the staff as a fill-in copy editor in March 1990, and to me, as Book Editor and columnist, Holt was a rock star.

The pullout books sections of the Sunday Chronicle and Examiner was the first thing I read each weekend, digging it out of its secure location within the Pink Section, and the reviewing style struck me as serious and responsible, but somehow a little more fun and engaging than, for example, the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

I respected Holt because I knew she could flat-out write, she wrote with no fear of coming across as pedestrian, she trusted her insights into the books under review and she trusted her reader to come along with her on a small journey of ideas.

The first “By Patricia Holt” byline in the Sunday Examiner seems to have come in September 1974 when she reviewed two books on heartthrob actor James Dean and opened this way: “This is not, of course, the Jimmy Dean who promotes pork sausage.” Bravo! Are we having fun yet? Hell yeah.

Holt continues: “This is Jimmy Dean the actor, superstar, and cult hero of the early Fifties who perfected the lip-dangled cigarette, the sullen hip slouch and the pained rebel look that teenagers have been copying for years.”

This is an enduring critical voice all its own, but for me, I hear echoes of two other writers with connections to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s, young Pauline Kael and young Joan Didion.

Holt also brought to her work the impressions and insights of someone out in the community, like Herb Caen filling us in on another story he heard at the Washington Street Bar and Grill. In 1977, honoring iconoclastic Berkeley bookseller Fred Cody, Holt referenced one time when a tear gas canister was fired into Cody’s Books on Telegraph, and another time when Fred and his wife Pat “asked an unknown author by the name of Carlos Castaneda to appear for what they thought would be a small autographing session, only to find to their horror that 60 spaced-out students showed up to berate Castaneda for not writing about LSD!” Fred Cody, Holt wrote, had a knack for encouraging sales of books by unknowns, and “steered his customers toward the works of Gary Snyder, Frank Herbert, Robert Creely, Tom Robbins, Castaneda, (Allen) Ginsberg, and many others long before any of them had ‘made it’ nationally.”

The same, of course, could be said of Holt, she steered readers toward the works of writers who deserved the attention—and I remember, early on, her explaining that in reviewing a well known writer, a reviewer could be as negative as one felt called to be, but one did not trash the work of an unknown; we were either calling attention to a new voice worth discovering, or we didn’t bother.

Holt and editor Alix Madrigal had a delightful way of bringing high seriousness to the ongoing effort to keep alert Bay Area readers up on new books, but without ever taking themselves too seriously.

I’m at a loss, looking back, to understand why Pat and Alix ever let me review for them. I had an English degree from Berkeley, and a few clips, including some book reviews, but so did a lot of people. I reviewed a book on Nicaragua by the great Roy Gutman in late 1988, but it was the next fall, reviewing “The Geography of Desire” by Robert Boswell, that I started to feel like I’d learned something from Holt.

I wonder about my critical take, but here’s my lede: “Robert Boswell’s sturdy, competent, gutsy ‘The Geography of Desire’ tells the story of an irritating norteamericano exiled in a fictional Central American country with the murder and repression we’ve come to expect of the region.”

Writing in the late 1980s, it was obviously a lot easier than it is now to take that giant leap to a frame of mind in which books vitally mattered, and it was good and right to care deeply about the choices writers made. Those were the currents of that time and place, especially in San Francisco and Northern California.

Still, I see in Pat Holt a remarkable person, and a distinctive talent, who enriched our lives and imaginations, well deserving of the tributes she’s earned since her death late last year, including this remembrance at Zyzzyva by my friend Regan McMahon.

I went on to reviews books for other talented Chronicle Book Editors, all great people, David Kipen, Oscar Villalon, John McMurtrie, and all are major figures in West Coast letters, as I see it. We were so lucky to have them, and the Sunday stand-alone section they gave us.

My point is not to be maudlin, my point is to look forward: What other institutions can we build to help connect a community of people who love books? How can we get out the word on exciting new authors, the way that Pat and Fred Cody did, the way that Pat Holt did? Books matter more than ever, I believe, and if we don’t fight for their place in our lives, we can lose it. That fight, Pat Holt showed me years ago, starts with love.

—Steve Kettmann

WCR Residencies for 2023

The summer schedule has filled up quickly this year. If you’re interested in a Weeklong Writing Residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods in the Santa Cruz (CA) area this year, most of our slots are taken. We do still have two openings for the Library House, as of now, for the weeks starting Monday, June 5 or Monday, June 12.

Other than those slots, our next availability is for the week starting September 18 (Zen Suite or Library House).

Kettmann Book Update

For my next book, I’m delving deep into the world of major-league baseball managers. The trend for a decade or so was to argue that field managers don’t much matter to the outcome of a game; many teams undermined the authority of their managers in different ways. I’m interested in who these extraordinary individuals are as people—and yes, knowing Dusty Baker, Bruce Bochy, Gabe Kapler and others well, I do believe they are pretty amazing people with remarkable personal qualities. The book represents a long collaboration with my friend Pedro Gomez, who died two years ago, prompting us to publish "Remember Who You Are," a book of essays inspired by his example.

My work on the book led to an article in last Sunday’s New York Times, making a case that baseball this year is worth a fresh look. “Major League Baseball Has Unleashed a Faster, Freer Version of Itself. You'll Need to Pay Attention." If you have comments, I’d love to see them.