Writers get a few political words in

Call it the written-word equivalent of musicians rockin’ the vote -- without the towers of amps. Novelists Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Anne Lamott, Alice Sebold and Suzan-Lori Parks gathered to read from their works Tuesday night at UCLA to benefit Downtown for Democracy, a liberal political action committee of artists, writers, designers and filmmakers.

“I’ve never done something like this before,” the very private Wallace said before the event. “But this is an emergency.”

“It’s almost an involuntary response,” agreed Chabon.

The writers gathered backstage in the green room, exuding a kind of sexy confidence and humor.

Anne Lamott, in her dreadlocks and wearing a chunky necklace with the letters V-O-T-E set between sea-green stones, is slightly older than the other readers. The first campaign she was actively involved in was George McGovern’s. It was 1972 and Lamott was 18. “Listen to this,” she said leaning closer, “I actually believed he’d win.”

They’re keeping things light; the last thing they want is to fall into the deadly earnestness of the ‘60s. “I do not want to sound like some foam-spewing liberal,” said Wallace, whose sweet, direct demeanor is not what you’d expect after reading his whiplash prose. “I wasn’t an active Kerry supporter in the primaries,” he said, “but I’d like to see a regime change.... For the first time I’m voting for a candidate based on electability.”

“I voted for Ross Perot,” chimed in Eggers, who appeared to be doing several things at once, including editing a manuscript, preparing his reading for the evening and talking with reporters. Eggers looks like his writing: lanky and sharp in blue jeans and fawn-colored desert boots. “My older brother worked for Bush. We talked a lot. I’ve always been able to hear both sides. But Bush’s positions have been cowardly. He has caved to every possible special interest.”

Chabon believes that writers and artists, on the whole, should stay out of politics. Though sometimes, he admitted, “it’s worked out well for the world, it’s almost always a bad thing for writers.”

Chabon, who lives in Berkeley, doesn’t write directly about politics, although his novels contain political issues, particularly child-related. He was married many years ago to a woman whose parents were Reagan voters, he told a reporter, but that seems to be as close as many of the authors here have gotten to a real live Republican.

Wallace said he knows plenty of Republicans but Republican fiction writers? Everyone has a hard time coming up with names beyond Tom Clancy and Mark Helprin.

Perhaps due to its solitary nature, literature doesn’t seem to divide nearly so neatly as popular music, with its country and western Republicans and rocker Democrats.

Downtown for Democracy was started a year and a half ago by a group of friends who worked in publishing in New York. Its mission is “to invigorate progressive politics and beat George Bush by mobilizing Americans who share our liberal values but don’t participate in politics.”

The group has raised more than $600,000 through readings and other events. A literary evening similar to the UCLA event, held in March at New York’s Cooper Union, raised $150,000. The group typically targets young voters through college campus appearances.

“This is not the time to question our failures,” said Jonathan Safran Foer, the evening’s emcee. “It is time to push full-speed ahead with our failures.” Safran Foer, author of the critically acclaimed “Everything Is Illuminated,” toyed with the audience. “In our America, anyone can drive a Hummer while applying aerosol hairspray to a toupee made from an endangered animal.” Thunderous applause.

He made a few other pro-Bush-sounding statements that were met with similar applause, until it got a little confusing and the audience became unsure of when to clap. “Four more years!” shouted an enthusiastic listener.

Chabon read from his upcoming novel, “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.” Wallace (“Oh, good, another white man with glasses,” he said as he took the podium), read a fragment from the life of a goody-two-shoes 11-year-old that ends with his bomb of a birthday party. Lamott read an essay about Bush despair; Sebold read a story about a drowned town; playwright Parks sang a blues song from her novel a cappella; and Eggers closed the evening with a story set in the future narrated by a father who tells his little girl all the things that he and her mother were able to accomplish with a little political will and a lot of sex: from passing a law forcing lobbyists to wear cowbells, to freeing the world of fossil fuels and genocide and populating the planet with llamas.

“It was all so possible,” he read.

The most radical gesture of the evening came when Lamott lifted her fist in the air and said, “Give the power back to the people!”

Even Sebold, who came across as the most serious of the group, began her reading by touting the inherent good of having a gay president. She also threw a George Bush-shaped doggie toy into the audience.

As writers, rather than rockers, there was no ranting or spectacle. Just simple stories that at first had an almost helpless tone, but as they sank in seemed to grow more mature, more hopeful.