Who is the judge?

In my last post I described the experience of publishing The Birth Machine with changes imposed by the publisher which ran strongly counter to my authorial/aesthetic intentions, and the way I then felt about the published work. In today's Guardian, Mark Ravenhill discusses similar issues, focusing this time on a writer's own 'mistakes' which he or she sees only after a work has gone out into the public domain. I touched on the fact that academics, in writing about the first edition of The Birth Machine, had written about a work which in fact I did not want to own, and Ravenhill develops an implication of this:

Whether a reader likes the play or not, it will look to them like an authoritative stream of text, a definitive statement. What I see is great black holes of missed opportunities. This is not false modesty. This is quite honestly what it feels like to open a book with my name on the cover. I'm amazed that academics haven't grasped this. Whenever an academic talks to me about my work, there's still an assumption that here is a definitive, confident text that is at my bidding.

Ravenhill's statement that writers can always ever after see improvements they could have made to their work is very true. He argues, however, that writers should never let this lead them to suppress their work (as Deep Purple have, with Live at the Birmingham NEC 1993):

Artists aren't always the best judges as to which of their works should make it into the public domain. If his family had followed his instructions, all of Kafka's manuscripts would have been burnt and we would have lost some of the 20th century's most important literature.