Paris is a recurring place in John McGahern’s life, associated with two relationships and with the movement between literary work abroad and a possible return to Ireland. He first met Annikki Laaksi there in the summer of 1963; years later, after travelling to America together, he lived in Paris with Madeline Green, where the prospect of settling in Ireland took shape.

A Meeting and a Departure

In the summer of 1963, while in Paris, McGahern met Annikki Laaksi, a Finnish theatre director. After receiving a year’s leave from his school to make use of the Macauley Award, he went to Helsinki and married her later that year. Finland was not a country he felt he could live in, and after Christmas the couple moved first to London and then to Spain, staying in a borrowed house on the Almería coast. Paris thus stands at the beginning of a sequence of departures rather than as the couple’s home: the meeting there led into marriage and a year spent moving between countries.

A Shared Home with Madeline Green

Paris later became a home for McGahern and Madeline Green. After they travelled to America together, they returned to live in the city, where Green had a small apartment. In this period McGahern’s first book of stories, Nightlines, was published and received more than a warm reception; he also won a substantial prize and, for the first time in years, had money. The city therefore frames a contrasting stage in his life: not only a place of shared domestic life, but also one in which his writing brought recognition and financial relief.

The Question of Returning to Ireland

One evening in Paris, McGahern asked Green whether she would be interested in living in Ireland for a year, with the understanding that they could leave if she did not like it. Through a friend they found a house to rent by the sea near Clifden. The move turned the question raised in Paris into a trial of life in Ireland: the couple made friends, spent time with their neighbours in local bars, walked or cycled, and McGahern began fishing on the ocean in a boat he was allowed to use. Paris’s significance lies partly in this transition. It was both the setting of a shared life abroad and the place from which the couple considered a return to Ireland.