In Search of Anthony Burgess: Callian

The novelist Anthony Burgess owned, and on an occasional basis inhabited, the house at Rue des Muets 6, Callian, in the Var, from about 1976.

He writes in 'You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess': 'The denuding of the Trastevere flat meant the transfer of everything in it to a small house in Callian, a village in the Var, which Liana [his second wife] almost distractedly bought when passing through Provence on the way to Monaco.'

Later in the same book (p368) he writes: 'Liana and I escaped from the Grand Prix in Monaco to the village of Callian in the Var, where our little house lay on the rue des Muets in the core of a little labyrinth of streets. I put together my thoughts on music and literature in a brief book, then fixed myself up at an outdoor café table with ballpoints and scoring paper and set Hopkins's "The Wreck of the Deutschland" for baritone soloist, chorus, and large orchestra. It could not, of course, be done, but I had to prove this to myself....This work was interrupted by a call to go to Cesena...'