Writers Coalition Jumps Into the Censorship Fray : Arts: Organization founders hope to strengthen artists’ position in the ongoing funding dispute between the National Endowment for the Arts and Congress.

An ad hoc group of more than a half dozen major writers’ organizations and literary associations has taken preliminary steps to organize a national coalition to protest censorship pressures on the National Endowment for the Arts.

A two-day organizational meeting of the still-unnamed coalition ended Monday afternoon in Washington after members held a private--but reportedly frank and candid--90-minute meeting with John E. Frohnmayer, the endowment’s chairman who was recently caught up in a controversial decision to impound and then restore a $10,000 grant for an AIDS-related art show at a New York City gallery.

Organizations that attended the initial meeting meeting Sunday--held at the Washington offices of the New Republic magazine--and met Monday morning with Frohnmayer included PEN Center USA West (based in Los Angeles) and the New York-based PEN American Center, which was represented by its president, author Larry McMurtry.

Other groups involved include the Modern Language Assn., the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, the Authors Guild, the Poetry Society of America, Poets and Writers, Associated Writing Programs, which is an umbrella group of college and university creative writing departments, and at least three regional writers’ organizations.

Richard Bray, executive director of PEN Center USA West, said the coalition hopes to encourage writers and literary societies to take a direct role in working for repeal of provisions of a 1990 endowment appropriation bill that impose content-controls on endowment grants for artwork in any medium that could be construed as obscene.

Coalition members were reluctant to give details of the discussion with Frohnmayer. But The Times learned that the writers requested the meeting, which Frohnmayer first agreed to, then canceled and later rescheduled. Frohnmayer reportedly encouraged the writers’ organizations to make a forceful, public case against the potential for censorship within the context of the restrictive language in the funding bill.

Frohnmayer declined to discuss the Monday meeting.

Development of the coalition within the nation’s literary community was characterized by some key figures in the organizing movement as important because the literature field has historically been the source of the endowment’s most heated and public controversies. Until disputes over two photography exhibitions broke out last spring, literature grants had been the precipitating factor in nearly every threat in Congress to the endowment.

Members of the organizing panel discussed the new coalition on Tuesday. They said the group, which hopes to grow and broaden its base over the next three or four weeks, expects to select a name for itself by sometime next week and hold a larger, more public gathering in Washington early next year.

Bray and Elliot Figman, head of the New York-based Poets and Writers and himself a member of an endowment literature review panel, said the coalition hopes to encourage writers of all sorts to offer opinion pieces and other essays focusing on censorship to newspapers and magazines. They said writers will also be urged to undertake work dealing with censorship and to engage in direct contacts with arts policy leaders.

Bray said coalition organizers hope to broaden membership to include such diverse organizations as the American Library Assn. and the Writers Guild of America.

“I was glad to see that a few writers’ organizations could get together around a common cause,” Bray said Tuesday. “Obviously, we need to broaden that. It needs to be not just people from New York or Los Angeles.”

Figman and Liam Rector, director of the Virginia-based Associated Writing Programs, said the coalition came into being because writers have begun to feel the effects of a possible chilling of artistic freedom at the endowment in the wake of insertion of obscenity-control language in the funding bill. The language was a watered-down version of wording initially proposed by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) last summer that would have prohibited federal funds to art deemed offensive or indecent.

“I think the consensus was we wanted to support the endowment and make a stronger case in favor of the arts and what writers and other artists have contributed over the years,” Figman said. “We feel the new law is detrimental. It gets in the way of the best art being produced and the endowment supporting the artist.”

The meeting was at least the second unpublicized, off-the-record encounter with arts leaders Frohnmayer has held since the AIDS art show controversy broke out earlier this month. He previously met with top officials of state, regional and local arts agencies after giving a public speech at a convention of a national group of such organizations.

The writers’ concerns were galvanized by a decision by Frohnmayer to separate and hold out for special review five literature fellowship grant applications because writing samples accompanying them included stylistic or thematic elements that might be construed as obscene. Frohnmayer endorsed the fellowships after the National Council on the Arts unanimously recommended approval earlier this month.

Several writers’ group officials who attended the meeting said Frohnmayer overcame initial concern about his decision to hold up the literature fellowship grants. “I came away with a kind of confidence that he (Frohnmayer) is going to act as an advocate,” one writers’ official said. “We need to see that he is an advocate, but he has to walk a very close line between enforcing the laws and protecting the endowment from going down in flames.”

Meanwhile, in a separate development in an apparently growing attempt to broaden public support for the endowment and to oppose perceived censorship pressures on the federal arts agency, a group of 17 members of the Congressional Arts Caucus, which includes more than 250 members of the House and Senate, will meet today at the Los Angeles Theatre Center with four influential local arts officials to discuss threats to artistic freedom of expression.

The visit of the arts caucus members, who include Rep. Bob Carr (D-Mich.), the caucus chairman, was not publicized. Officials of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which organized the three-day congressional tour, said the public would not be permitted to attend today’s censorship discussion. The association says it wants to encourage a blunt exchange between the congressmen and local arts officials.