ART & HARD TIMES: Cameron Bellm

Part 1 of a new series!

Welcome to the first installment of ART & HARD TIMES, a weekly series I’m running through June about the art that helps us get through life’s ups and downs. Each Friday I’ll share a conversation with one of my friends, all deeply-thoughtful creatives and fellow Substackers, talking about a particular work of art that was meaningful to them during a difficult time in their lives.

We begin today with the one and only

Cameron Bellm

! Knowing the overlap in our readership she probably doesn’t need an introduction, but I’ll offer one anyway: Cameron is a Seattle-based writer and contemplative in action. She combines her love of language with a deeply-rooted spirituality to compose prayers, poems, essays, and devotionals linking our modern lives with our ancient faith. Her first book, The Sacrament of Paying Attention: How Writers, Artists, and Mystics Can Lead Us into Sacred Human Communion, will be published by Eerdmans in 2026. She’s also a member of the Jesuit Media Lab community of Ignatian creatives!¹

She also has a doctorate in Russian literature, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to say about someone. That’s relevant to the piece of art she chose for this conversation: Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita.

Lolita likely also doesn’t need an introduction. Nabokov’s first novel written in English, it presents the fictional memoir of Humbert Humbert, a professor of French literature who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze (or Lolita, as he calls her). One of the most controversial novels of the 20th century, Lolita still provokes strong reactions today — but also retains a place among the most important English-language novels of all time.

I should also be a little more specific: Cameron didn’t just choose to talk about Lolita, but the 2005 audiobook read by Jeremy Irons, which she listened to at a crucial decision point in her life. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did!

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Can you tell me a little about how you were introduced to Lolita, and why it resonated with you?

I was first introduced to Nabokov in grad school at Berkeley, in a course I sat in on in the spring of 2006. That was a super stressful semester, as I was preparing for my comprehensive MA exams, both written and oral. Sitting in on an extra class didn't really make any logical sense, but it kind of rescued me from being utterly swallowed by exam anxiety by reacquainting me with the whole reason why I was there in the first place: the unmitigated joy and magic of language and story.

Nabokov was a poet before he was a novelist, and he was also a polyglot and chess master. I think it's quite fair to say that he was a genius. He constructed these intricate puzzle boxes of novels, on every page of which the prose just danced. You can feel his delight, I think, in playing with what words can do. I started noticing more beauty in my daily life (that's hardly difficult in Berkeley in the spring), and I enjoyed the conspiratorial feeling Nabokov gifts his readers: the sense that you, too, are in on the game of language, that he's planted little tricks and treasures throughout the pages just for you. Lolita is the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, and it's an elegant chess game of a text. With every page, you can sense Nabokov archly raising an eyebrow at you, sitting back in his chair, and purring, "Your move."

For this conversation, you chose not only Lolita but the audiobook edition read by Jeremy Irons. How did you start listening to it?

[In 2010], I'd have the chance to teach Lolita to undergrads at Berkeley, and it was during this time that I set out to the shops on College Avenue to buy some new jeans. But instead, my feet led me into Pegasus Books, where I bought a ten-CD set of Jermey Irons reading Lolita. Let the record show that I am a very practical person. I think all the time about this quote from sixteenth-century scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus: "When I get a little money, I buy books; if any is left, I buy food and clothes." It's basically my life motto.

In the world's most fortuitous turn of events, this was the era of the iPod. I loaded all ten CDs onto my personal soundtrack to the movie of my life. Most of its other content was music lifted from my brother, who was, and is, much cooler than me. I always left my iPod on shuffle, and I'd spend a good chunk of my day being privately serenaded while taking the long bus ride to and from campus. Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" and The Smiths' "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" would be followed by the sonorous voice of Jeremy Irons, taking me, at random, into a different room in the novel, all of them immaculately aesthetic.

The heart of this conversation series is about art that helps us through dark times, so: how was this a dark time for you?

I was 27 and nearing the end of my PhD program, and I think I knew I'd be leaving academia behind. I'm not a competitive person, and jobs were scarce even before the recession of 2008, which was devastating to higher education and to the humanities in particular, which had already been scraping by on bare-bones funding. I was determined to finish my degree, but I was also beginning to make my peace with going in a different direction.

I resonate with that feeling of a passion crashing up against what you need to do to make a living out of it: that was my experience of being a Communications major for a year.

I was constantly bruising myself against this wall of not knowing if I could really do this for a living--not knowing if I was the right fit for it, not knowing if I had the skills and confidence for it, not knowing if there would be a job for me somewhere, even if the answer to those first few questions was affirmative. I felt a sense of impending loss, I think, and sorrow that I wasn't sure I had all the puzzle pieces to make the complete picture of a life in academia.

How did listening to Lolita help?

Having Lolita in my ears reassured me of all that I could take with me, even as I set out on a different path. Returning to it years after that first encounter reminded me of the deep joy that led me into this field in the first place. And I knew that I would always carry that with me, whether I ever discussed it around a seminar table again or not.

It's clear how much joy Nabokov’s writing brings you (and gives me a good sense of why you ended up in a literature doctoral program in the first place!). Was that joy something you felt you were losing in the study of literature, and needed to rediscover?

Well, I'm a romantic! When I explained my deep draw to Russian literature to a friend when we graduated college, he said, "That is the most naive thing I've ever heard." He wasn't a close friend, and I don't think he meant any harm by it! But I understood his point: the kind of unmitigated passion I was expressing for what might be described in shorthand as "the Russian soul" was something rare in our age of cynicism.

Sure, it's possible to drain a work of its emotional impact by stabbing it repeatedly with analytical swords. And all throughout my time in grad school, I felt utterly put-off by the abstraction of literary theory. But the literary texts themselves? They only lived and breathed more deeply and vividly each time I read and taught them. What I miss the most about grad school, honestly, is the shared glee of that with my colleagues--reveling in Nabokov's secret symmetry, taking apart the puzzle box of a Gogol story, marveling at the masterpiece of Pushkin's Onegin stanza.

In a different world, I would have happily done that all my living days. But I felt like Nabokov was reassuring me that I still could. And that was a gift.

What is Lolita’s lasting legacy for you? Do you revisit it?

I still have that old iPod, with "rock the casbah" etched on the back, and I still break it out from time to time. I still have the CDs, too, and, of course, an entire bookshelf full of Nabokov's novels. I have multiple copies of Lolita (see aforementioned practicality), and I take them down and reread them when I need a dose of joy, a reminder of what humans can do with language, an assurance that the textual blocks with which I have built my life are still sturdy and sound.

Lolita is obviously a very famous and very controversial work. As someone who loves it, how do you navigate that?

I definitely had students who expressed concern about that. I would always return to Nabokov's answer to where on earth the idea for Lolita came from:

“As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.”

Lolita is never given a voice of her own in the novel--it's narrated entirely by Humbert Humbert. But we can see the bars of her cage. And we can see the indignity that she was not even offered a piece of charcoal to sketch them.

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Things Seen & Heard

• If you’re not already following Cameron’s work, you should! You can find updates about her writing and speaking at her website, her Instagram (where she often shares wonderful poems and prayers), and subscribe to her Substack, Attention and Astonishment!

• The Jeremy Irons audiobook of Lolita is available on Libby, if your library has it! You can also find it for sale still from all of the usual audiobook purveyors. I’m sure you can find an iPod for sale somewhere, too, if you want the full Bellm experience.

Thanks for reading! Check back next week for Part 2, featuring a conversation with the great

Alli Bobzien

!

1. As you’ll see, this series is also a stealth advertising campaign for the Jesuit Media Lab, where you can find work from all of my great conversation partners in one place.