On writing the book, Baldwin said in the New York Times Book Review:[4]: 218
I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound. I am not an intellectual, not in the dreary sense that word is used today, and do not want to be: I am aiming at what Henry James called 'perception at the pitch of passion.'
Asked to cite literary influences, Baldwin said that Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and George Bernard Shaw were his "models."[2]: 201 The character of Yves is connected to Baldwin's lover Lucien Happersberger, who made plans in 1960 to meet Baldwin in New York City.[19]
It has been argued that James Baldwin is in three characters: Rufus as Baldwin would have turned out had he not moved to France; Eric as Baldwin was in Paris; and Vivaldo as a writer struggling with a writer's block because of his love affairs, in the manner of Baldwin himself.[1] Baldwin has also been identified with Ida, as Rufus's advocate after death, and Richard, a writer who has become successful.[2]: 202
Baldwin later said that he developed the character of Rufus to complement and explain Ida.[3]
The book has been described as an implicit criticism of Mailer's The White Negro and its passive romanticization of black culture. Brandon Gordon describes this critique in terms of the relationship between Vivaldo and Rufus, mediated by Leona. Gordon writes: "Contrary to Vivaldo's expectations, emulating the African American's hypermasculine sexual ethos does not ultimately enable him to fulfill the hipster's fantasy of embodied identification." He concludes that, in fact, Vivaldo's homosexual encounter with Eric at the end of the novel—and specifically the fact that Vivaldo is penetrated—represents a truer form of "embodied identification" with another.[20]
One author felt the title echoes lines in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta:[21]
Thou hast committed— Fornication: but that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead.
