Names make news. Last week these names made this news: Novelist Ernest Hemingway, 54, fervent apostle of Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy of living life up to the hilt, has never numbered love of airplanes among his enthusiasms. When he left his home in Cuba (and his 25 cats) last year to revisit Africa after a lapse of two decades, he traveled by steamship. To reach a base camp on the rolling plains of British East Africa, the husky author and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, bumped painfully through rough country by truck.

But once on safari, Hemingway met and began to admire an African bush pilot named Roy Marsh. In a recent letter to a New York friend, Mrs. Hemingway described Hemingway's all-out conversion to the air age: "Poppa is so keen on scouting in the Ndege [Swahili for airplane] at 600 or something shillings a half day [about $84], which includes bumps and rolls and swooping down on the deck and wing-brushing the chulu hills, that we will shortly have no money left except for gin and cabbage . . ."

When Hemingway broke camp after five months of hunting and writing and set out for Africa's east coast to fish, he hired Pilot Marsh and his four-place Cessna. Last week Pilot Marsh left Nairobi for an African village named Masindi, planning to circle the spectacular Murchison Falls of the Victoria Nile on the way. But Marsh and the Hemingways never arrived at Masindi. A B.Q.A.C. plane, diverted from its route to search for them, found the Cessna in trees near the falls and reported that there was no sign of life to be seen.

The world assumed that Hemingway, one of the most accident-prone of famous men (he absorbed 237 separate and distinct pieces of metal as an ambulance driver on Italy's Piave front during World War I, has an artificial kneecap, bears scars from a World War II automobile accident, a collapsing ceiling and innumerable other mishaps), was dead. Newspapers all over the world ran scare headlines and obituaries, Havana waiters wept, millions of Hemingway readers expressed shock and sorrow.

The next day it turned out that indestructible Poppa was still alive. In its forced landing (made to avoid a flock of huge jungle birds), the Cessna had damaged nothing but its undercarriage. Its three occupants clambered down cliffs to the crocodile-infested river, while clouds of mosquitoes whined about them. As night fell, they built a fire to keep curious elephants at bay. One elephant, Hemingway said later, "was silhouetted twelve paces away, listening to my wife snore." When he woke her, she said, " 'I never snore. You've got a fixation about "it.' I said, 'So has the elephant.' "

Next day the three castaways thumbed a ride in a passing launch (full of tourists) and were taken to Butiaba, on the shore of Lake Albert. The Hemingways climbed into another plane--which not only crashed but burned on the takeoff. Again they escaped serious harm: Hemingway got out with a cut head, his wife with two cracked ribs. This week, after cautious traveling by automobile, they settled down for a bit of rest in the town of Entebbe, in Uganda. "I feel wonderful," cried Hemingway, clutching a stalk of bananas and a bottle of gin. "I think [my luck] she is running very good."

In London's Savoy Hotel, 19 middle-aged matrons, misty-eyed remnants of what was once one of England's most breathless fan clubs, gathered to toast a visiting Los Angeles real-estate man, who described himself as "a has-been." But after greying oldtime Cinemactor Ramon (Call of the Flesh) Novarro, 54, was toasted as the greatest movie lover ever, he murmured to a newsman: "Take that back about being a has-been." Agreed one of the girls, stressing her present-tenseness: "He is luscious, isn't he!"

The Los Angeles Sales Executive Club picked Vice President Richard Nixon as "Salesman of the Year" for his job of world" "selling on the his U.S. recent to the people globe-girdling of tour.

In the Russian satellites, the press worked itself into a dutiful science-fiction frenzy over the birthday of Demigod Nikolai Lenin. Items from Budapest's Szabad Nep and Bucharest's Scanteia: "While no longer on earth, [he] is the son of the stars and the moon . . . The first words Lenin ever spoke were 'bread and freedom.' . . . Lenin's right arm was made of gold . . ." --

-The Paris Review caught expatriate Author Irwin Shaw, 40, in its backyard (a villa in the Pyrenees) and goaded him into talking about his eight produced plays, none as successful as scores of his short stories, and all but one (The Gentle People), in Shaw's candid opinion, "flops." When Shaw lamented that even his one dramatic triumph on Broadway had been misunderstood in its intent, the Review hazarded a guess that he had little regard for New York theater audiences. Retorted the peevish playwright: "Oh, but I do. I have a fine play in mind I'll write for them some day. The curtain slides up on a.stage bare except for a machine gun facing the audience, [which] is given time to rustle their paper bags and their programs, wheeze and cough ... A tall man dressed in evening clothes . . . comes downstage to the footlights, and after a little bow, smiles charmingly at the audience, giving them more time to mumble and rustle ... Then he walks upstage, adjusts the machine gun, and blasts them."

A.F.L. Musicians Czar James Caesar Petrillo flashed belated congratulations to Earl Warren on his rise from "union clarinet player" to Chief Justice of the U.S., got a grateful reply and Warren's "regards to the brothers of the Federa tion. Their kindness to me has always been more than a onetime poor clarinet player deserved."

--On his way to Pakistan, where his Mos lem followers plan to give him his weight (215 Ibs.) in platinum, the Ago Khan confided in Cairo that the bite had been put on him for money by a one-man Moslem charity. The petitioner: Egypt's dethroned King Farouk, who used to bal ance his fat losses at casino gaming tables with such conscience-salving donations as $8.40 to Egypt's Boy Scouts. But not even in the sacred name of Moslem broth erhood would the rich old Aga fall for the Faroukian cajoleries. "Farouk's always been like that," chuckled the Aga. "I didn't give him money, because he simply doesn't need it."

-In London, famed Author W. Somerset Maugham, who turned 80 this week, looked back on his life and works. "I used to travel," he told the New York Times's Thomas F. Brady, "because I liked the act of traveling and particularly because I got material for stories. I didn't go to India because I felt that Rudyard Kipling had got all the stories there were to be got there. When I finally did go, I bitterly regretted that I hadn't gone 20 years be fore, because I saw that there was a large part of India that Rudyard had not touched ... On one occasion Kipling sent me a message saying that he had been spending the winter in the West Indies and that there were a lot of short stories to be got there. They were not the kind he could write, he said, but the kind I could. So I went there and found there weren't any I could write either."

House Speaker Joseph W. Martin Jr., fed up with forecasts of economic doom, declared: "A small but hard-core group of people in this country is trying to pro. mote us into hard times for political reasons. The majority of these are either downright left wing or friendly to it. They are the egghead wing of American political life. They infest the ADA, an organization which calls itself Americans for Democratic Action, but which might properly be renamed 'A Depression Anytime.' "

Actress Peggy Wood, who plays a Norwegian mama on CBS-TV's Mama, strolled over to an NBC-TV studio, racked her brain on a quiz program called Name. That Tune, identified an obscure melody as Mendelssohn's War March of the Priests. She later turned over her $1,600 jackpot money to Brooklyn's Norwegian Children's Home, got bussed by two of its wards as if she were really mama.

At a Hollywood party honoring his daughter Susan, just returned from entertaining U.N. troops in Korea, 20th Century-Fox's Production Boss Darryl F. Zanuck, polo player, big game hunter and physical culture enthusiast, turned out to be the star attraction. During a lull in the scheduled entertainment, Zanuck mounted the nightclub stage, laid aside his outsize cigar, stripped to the waist and did four strenuous chin-ups on a trapeze. Then he announced to the flabbergasted 400 guests that he would perform the difficult trick of lowering himself by one hand. He tried desperately, but did not quite make it. Throughout the evening he tried several more times, but never made it. Finally, gathering up his coat and shirt, he wandered off the stage, muttering morosely: "I'm only 51."

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