WRITER JOHN Broderick was not an obvious choice to review a book on boxer Muhammad Ali as he was transforming himself from Cassius Clay into a Black Muslim but he used the platform to offer his own definition of style:
Style is one of those human attributes which are easy enough to recognise, but extremely difficult to define. ‘‘What is style?’’ Cocteau once asked. ‘‘For many people, a very complicated way of saying very little. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things . . .’’
I should say that it is a sort of pounce or dash, a certain panache which may be physical, or spiritual, or entirely intellectual. A face turned to the world with bravery, courage, and a certain quiver of emotion, well concealed but discernible. It may be a pose, or it may be entirely natural, but it is absolutely right for the person who adopts it. It is never heavy-handed and in nearly all cases it embodies some inner tension, like that of a man crossing Niagara Falls with a smile on his face, the while flourishing a coloured umbrella in the teeth of the world.
To give some examples. No living member of the British royal family has style, except Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent. General de Gaulle and Miss Marlene Dietrich have it. (What a cabaret act that pair would make, billed perhaps as Ebb and Flo.) The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin has it, whereas the Cardinal of Armagh has not. Sir John Gielgud has it, but Mr Micheal MacLiammoir, curiously enough, has not. Nijinsky on stage had it, whereas off stage he was a bit of a lout. In the ring, Cassius Clay has it.
Which brings us by what some readers may think a commodious vicus of recirculation to the subject of this review. I never thought to read a book about a boxer, much less review one. What I know about the Queensberry rules might be written on the point of a pin. But then I never thought that such a boxer as Clay would appear on the scene.
He is more than a heavyweight champion – he is a social phenomenon.
Clay, of course, is a special case. He is a Negro, and therefore underprivileged from birth. He cannot be expected to take an enthusiastic view of the country which gave him birth. He has joined the Black Muslims, an organisation which could only flourish in the frantic conditions at present prevailing in the United States.
The author of this biography [Jack Olsen] is at some pains to discover just exactly what sort of person Clay, or Muhammad Ali, is. At heart he seems to be a nice young man who has been caught up in the vicious jungle of American public relations. A myth has been manufactured which has to be lived up to and Clay would appear to have done some over-playing. He dotes upon his mother and loves his young brother.
He is a narcissist, and when he declares that he is beautiful, he believes it. He is rather mean with money. His maternal great grandfather was an Irishman named Grady, which no doubt accounts for the fact that the Clays talk so much. His views on women are peculiar: like the character in one of Noel Coward’s plays, he believes that they ought to be beaten regularly, like gongs. It is doubtful if he dislikes the whites as much as he pretends. But it must be remembered that hatred has been forced upon the American Negro by social conditions and the arrogant behaviour of the Anglo-Saxons. Otherwise he is a young man whose character has not yet been formed, violently pushed into the public eye, and surrounded by sycophants. One hopes that he will grow up and settle down, if indeed anyone ever does that in America.