You Can't Just Leave
Tobias Wolff would like to think his first published novel, "Ugly Rumours", did not exist. It does not come up on any official list of his publications and his second, more widely known, novel, "Old School", when it came out first, was erroneously referred to as the "Debut Novel".
Wolff, however, is hardly the first one to be so embarrassed of his own early work as to take lengthy measures to erase its existence. Many had that tendency. Obviously though, being in the age as we are, it's pretty hard now to have someone forget something you put out thanks to the internet. And the dilemma isn't the availability of a work you do not want to be associated with under any circumstances, it's more about whether you "putting it out" means you lose the right to do so.
Getting, say, a novel published, means it's out there and you cannot "change" it in any manner anymore—this has been the case for the majority of cases. But to suppose that that event is where you have to draw the line is absurd because there have been instances when writers didn't. Gore Vidal routinely went back to his early novels and edited them—in one occasion, even changing the ending completely. Tennessee Williams edited after publication too. Nonfiction writers have to do it if a new fact arises that must be addressed and corrected. So in a sense you can and you are "disowning" portions of your work after you cross that line of 'putting it out'.
There will be people, however, claiming how partial disowning isn't the same as completely abandoning a book, which reflects the temperament of the person during the time he wrote it. That's a facile argument to make because writers don't exactly publish something they just jot down without further consideration, unless they happen to be teenagers who think they'll be famous if they self-publish their crappy fantasy novel on amazon.com.
Counter-argument: but even after editing, it reflects the temperament you had during a certain "period" of your life.
But then you'd have to distinguish how long that period is supposed to be, don't you? And aren't there writers who change bits and pieces of their work so much it entirely becomes different than the kind of story they started with? What I'm trying to say is you do change or delete stuff all the time, sometimes entire chunks of stuff, and drawing the line at publication is something you choose to do, meaning you can, if you want to, deviate from that practice.
There has been writers like Rushdie, who isn't very fond of his first novel either, says how once you put something out it should be there. But we also have to understand that it is up to the writer if he wants to change or disown, say, a short story or a novel. He should be able to without being judged on how he "cannot be embarrassed of his own writing". Because writers can be.
If a writer does want to make his book not exist anymore, you just have to roll with it. However, if you manage to have a copy of that book the writer hates so much, and you spread the word about it and make that book famous which in turn extremely annoys the writer, then that's awesome too.
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