Helsinki became a place of return and possibility in John McGahern and Annikki Laaksi’s marriage, but never a shared home they could both choose. Its seas, long summer nights, and professional opportunities drew Annikki back; McGahern’s certainty that he could not live in Finland made the city the setting for a widening difference between their futures.

First Journey and Early Visits

McGahern’s connection to Helsinki began after he won the Macauley Award, worth £1,000 and conditional on spending a year abroad. He met Finnish theatre director Annikki Laaksi in Paris during the summer, took leave without pay from his school that October, and went to Helsinki. He married Annikki later that year. After Christmas they moved to London and then to Spain, so Helsinki first belonged to a period of travel rather than settled life. Even then, McGahern felt that Finland was not a country in which he could ever live.

During their London years, Helsinki became part of a repeated separation and return. Annikki went back in summer to work for Finnish Radio, while McGahern remained in London; she later received an offer to work in television the following summer. Their professional lives also met in London: one winter they translated Veijo Meri’s Finnish novel The Manilla Rope for McGahern’s American publisher. Annikki rendered the original into rough English, McGahern reshaped it into Irish-English speech, and they worked together on the final version against the Finnish text.

A City of Unequal Belonging

When McGahern joined Annikki in Helsinki during a school holiday, he enjoyed the seas around the city, its long white nights, and the friends they had known when they were first together there. Annikki was earning well in television and was happy. Yet the visit sharpened a discomfort neither of them was willing to articulate: in Finland she was famous and he felt like her appendage, while in London the imbalance was reversed on a lesser scale. The same city that offered Annikki recognition and satisfying work left McGahern more certain that he could not make a life there.

The Offer and the Separation

Annikki’s prospects in Helsinki became more substantial when she was offered permanent television work, as well as the chance to produce freelance theatre productions of her own. She wanted McGahern to return with her. Their proposed life included a comfortable apartment overlooking the sea and the possibility that he could write without going to work. He refused to move, while telling her she should accept the job if she wanted it and that they could see whether they could manage the distance. Annikki believed the marriage was already too strained to survive such a separation and turned the offer down.

The unhappiness continued through the London winter, and they split up in the early summer. Helsinki was not the sole cause of the separation, but the choice it represented made their incompatible hopes concrete: Annikki had a career and a future she wanted there, while McGahern would not build his life in Finland. In retrospect, the emptying of their apartment recalled for him the removal of furniture from the family home at Aughawillan while his mother was dying, joining the end of this marriage to an earlier scene of loss.