Witi Ihimaera picks over old bones

Witi Ihimaera feared he might be faking it because his first three novels "came too easily". Picture / Brett Phibbs

The last time I was at Witi Ihimaera's house, five years ago, he made the most of the opportunity and got me to help him fold the sheets.

Today when we arrive he's on the top deck of his Herne Bay house, waving with one hand and with the other buttoning the shirt he's just ironed for the occasion. "Oh, damn," he says, when reminded of the washing trick - he should have waited and got me to do his ironing.

He is quite bossy, in an endearingly giggly way. He wants a picture taken of him with his bottle brush tree in crimson bloom in the background. He wanted me to go to Wellington with him and do the interview on the way there while we went shopping. The first thing he says when we get to the front door is: "Didn't you want to come to Wellington to go bling bling shoe shopping with me?"

The shoes are for one of his two daughters: a 28th birthday present. He is much excited about this prospect and adamant that the shoes be "slutty enough". His daughter's mother doesn't think much of this idea. "She wants me to get a more practical present, like maybe re-roofing the house." He remains good friends with his ex-wife, Jane. In the acknowledgments at the back of his sort-of new book, he thanks her for making it possible "for me to begin a career in writing".

Now he also has a career in, well, rewriting his own writing. This is beyond putting on a new roof: it sounds more demolishing the building and rebuilding from the foundations up. His sort-of new book is The Rope of Man, which is what he likes to call "a new version" of his 1973 novel Tangi and a sequel.

Since I last saw him he has been made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, which sounds quite grand. He has rewritten his first three books, which sounds a bit odd. And been involved, with Fiona Kidman, in a spat with Sunday Star-Times columnist Steve Braunias, over some satire which resulted in a published apology to the writers.

This, I feared, might have meant that Ihimaera had gone all huffy and pompous and had lost his sense of humour. I intended to ask about it some time later. But he brings it up within 10 minutes because he is talking about how, "a lot of people say they hate my writing ... I could show you letters". People also write to say they like it, which you can understand more readily. Ihimaera has no difficulty understanding the impulse: "Because you've just spent $35 that you could have spent at the pub."

He carries the nice letters "around with me in my briefcase for around four or five months. Because, you know, every now and then you want to feel good about yourself in a world that's constantly trying to knock you down. Every now and then, I'll pick out one of these bits and pieces of magic and say, 'No, no, no, no. I'm okay."

He is, if not hyper-sensitive, suffering from what I only half-jokingly refer to as "your inferiority complex".

He's certainly not the first writer to go back to a work 30 years after they last read it to find " ... how awful it was". But neither of us can think of any precedent for this peculiar revisiting of juvenilia. "My publishers didn't think much of the idea ... At first they thought it a crackpot, wacky, stupid idea which wouldn't make them any money." They were proved right there, he says. His agent asked if he couldn't at least give them new titles. So, "I was going to call it Tangi Strikes Again, or Revenge of Tangi. Basically, I have a bad B-movie brain. I do wish I had a better brain. If I had a better brain, I'd be writing like Janet Frame or somebody like that."

He worried for a long time that "one of these days they'll find me out. I felt that I was faking it, and I think there was an element of faking it in Tangi because I didn't know how to write properly". And he fretted that the three early works Pounamu Pounamu, Whanau and Tangi, written over an eight-week period, were "a bit of a con". They came too easily, he says.

I ask whether he recognised the younger writer when he went back to the books, and whether he admired him. He says: "Oh, yes. He was an absolutely gorgeous young man. He loved travelling, loved thinking, loved dreaming ... " What he did dream about? "Well, in those days I was heterosexual, so: who's the next girl I can get into bed." Goodness, really? I thought it might have been boys, but no. And hang on: "Wasn't he married?" He thinks this is very funny. "Men are men," he says.

He says he blubbed a fair bit when he started the rewriting, "Thinking, 'What on Earth am I doing?' In terms of these babies, you know, they are pieces of work that I really loved and I worried about, you know, the kinds of forgiveness that the work would need to give their creator."

After almost an hour, I still haven't quite settled why he was so keen on the project. He's happy to come up with an alternative answer: "I had nothing to do last summer".

That he was able to persuade his publishers says a lot about his status. Beyond the odd not-so-glowing review, and despite his earlier assertion, he doesn't seem to have been knocked down terribly much. He's one of our cultural icons, surely.

This is where he brings in the Sunday Star-Times column, which I'm not about to repeat here, for obvious reasons. Anyway, he thought it was homophobic and "personally offensive". He was also upset that people might have believed that he got a certain grant, when he didn't. I say it was satire, and that as a writer he must well know you don't have any control over the way people read things. "No, well, I live with that of, course, when I publish my work. But in this case I just did not agree it was satirical and neither did the lawyers."

You can't tell people they shouldn't be offended if they are. I wondered though if he thought the episode made him look as though he had no sense of humour. He says others wished they'd taken the same action and mentions another writer of whom I say: "Oh well. He's notoriously prickly, but I didn't think you were."

I tell him I'm going to sum him up like this: "Okay. A prickly character, and watch what you write." He can sound a bit pompous when he puts on his best professorial manner. He says: "Well, I've got a community and a fraternity and an academy that I'm very, very proud of. And I'm proud of my role within that community."

He finds this difficult to maintain, and moments later he's lit up laughing by an idea he's just had about suing for the exact amount of money mentioned in the column. Now that would have been funny. "Ha ha. I should have."

I think he has to remind himself he's a very important, very sober professor [at the University of Auckland]. After the interview he drops me in town in his BMW. We stop at a red light, but only just. He'd quite like to run it but "I'm a professor now". Someone, he says, would be bound to see and they'd say: "You should know better".

Despite that genial, giggly exterior, he can be a bit spiky. He has his reputation to protect, you know. Which possibly has quite a lot to do with the desire to rewrite, in a way, his own literary history.