IT is an interesting question whether a biographer is better off writing a book about a living subject or a dead one. Certainly it produces a different kind of book. "I was beginning to pine for dead biographical subjects who could be researched in libraries and did not set off round the world just when I needed them," Humphrey Carpenter, Robert Runcie's biographer, complains at one particularly difficult moment in the preparation of this book. Its subject, writing in July 1996, after reading the book in proof, said: "It is certainly not a hagiographical stocking filler but it is yet another personal investigation heavily dependent on the skilfully edited tape recorder. Burbling into it for background, I find it reproduced for substance. It is not only the syntax which makes me wince. There is much that I never imagined I would see in print."
Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop is certainly not hagiography but neither is it the "warts and all" treatment the Lord Protector recommended to his portraitist. Or is it that there aren't any warts? But again, it is probably a mistake for the biographer to see hostility to his subject as the necessary road to truth. As many biographies are possible as there are, different approaches to the subject and different preoccupations in the biographer. This particular book presents a closely executed portrait of Robert Runcie who comes across vividly as a decent, talented, compassionate, sometimes uncertain human being in whom the often found arrogance of office was replaced by a certain healthy diffidence about himself and his own powers. His last chaplain's opinion on him is very revealing: "There needs to be an element of lack of confidence in all the best people, because it prevents the arrogance that leads to the second rate."
The author's style and method allow us to come very close to his subject. And if Dr Runcie in his postscript to the book speaks rather negatively of burbling into a tape recorder and of finding what was meant as background emerging as substance, it is also true that the live interview method favoured by Carpenter allows us to meet face to face a fascinating human being in the everyday ordinariness of many phases of his life, from a Liverpool grammar school all the way to Lambeth Palace. It also allows us to hear the voices of family school friends, teachers, girlfriends, army colleagues describing a tall, athletic, auburn haired, talented, reserved, tentative and undecided young man as he moved with some uncertainty towards ministry in the Church.
After his war service as a tank commander in the Scots Guards, during which he won the Military Cross, Robert Runcie returned to Oxford to continue his interrupted studies. Here in the University Conservative Association he met Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher) and by his own account "did not take to her". "Not my sort of girl! I'm full of admiration for her but it's like sitting next to electricity." That was 1946. This was the woman who, thirty years later, in 1979, would offer him the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The decisive woman who had personalised the office of Prime Minister to an extraordinary degree was choosing a man whose notion of leadership in Church was a tentative one, dominated by the need to bring the whole community forward together.
There was in the Church of England in the 1980s a real danger of fragmentation, and Robert Runcie's method of dealing with intractable problems like the ordination of women was to earn him a reputation for indecisiveness and fence sitting. Likewise, his use of ghost writers for his speeches and sermons was to draw criticism from some. But it seems this misses the point. His leadership was not the personalised style of Mrs Thatcher but rather a pastoral holding together of a Church in crisis. His speeches and writings were not individual show pieces but attempts at speaking for the Church as a whole, attempts at making the search for insight and for wisdom, a community search. He showed a certain humility in seeking help to ensure that the final product would have the quality desired.
This rich and attractive book contains so much fascinating material that it is difficult to convey its sweep. Its treatment of the critical life and tragic death of the Rev. Gareth Bennett and of the anonymous Crockford's preface in which he strongly criticised Archbishop Runcie, offering a clearly highly critical presentation of his first six years in office, is a small masterpiece. On the other hand, the Irish reader will no doubt be tantalised by the fact that the book gives very little attention to the Archbishops Irish origins. His mother's parents came from Ireland and she, Ann Edna Benson, "did not like being thought of as Irish". The frankness and straightforwardness with which Dr Runcie speaks throughout the book is, perhaps, its most significant feature. When this is set beside the fact that many of those who know him describe him as constantly self critical and wanting to be loved by everyone, we can see the extent of Humphrey Carpenter's achievement.
Dr John Habgood, retired Archbishop of York, emphasised to the biographer that in Runcie there was a mixture of "holiness and humour, breadth and seriousness of purpose", and speaking of his work at Canterbury, added: "It was his bad luck that he had to do it during an exceptionally difficult period and that he was to some extent damaged by the vicious campaigns against him. As I saw him he was a classic Anglican who managed to maintain his balance against all the odds."