Not a few of our cultural critics believe that only four North American cities are habitable: New York, San Francisco, Boston and Montreal.

While much bickering among themselves is not altogether uncharacteristic of their calling, these critics have formulated this view in a spirit of remarkable unanimity. On the basis of wide travel in Europe and other estoeric locations, they contend that the four mettropolitan areas they praise possess some sort of cultural maturity they find lamentably lacking in other thriving centres, such as Tulsa, Toronto or Topeka.

Thanks to Walter Winchell, the Beatniks and Cleveland Amory (who are scarcely ever considered bedfollows), New York, San Francisco and Boston have been very capably extolled. Each of the three cities has specific and very different virtues that are celebrated in ways that are unique to its environment.

Montreal, alas, has no poet laureate, no clarion voice to rise above the Commerce Chamber cackle. Hugh MacLennan, a witty essayist and novelist who picks up bread-money teaching at Montreal's McGill University, comes closest to doing the job. Although his interest is confined to only a small and often uninteresting segment of the varied populace, he understands it and explains it very well indeed.

Like Eisenhower and the atomic bomb, Montreal never amounted to much until the Second World War really got going. The power elite of the town consisted largely of Calvinists who combined a shrewd commercial instinct with an outpost gentility that led them to construct large Presbyterian churches and to dress for dinner.

The city's French element was numerically supreme but economically impotent. Despite occasional outburts expressing dissatisfaction, the French were influential only in the sense that a French maid is influential in getting the dishes washed. With the arrival of the Depression, some of the Calvinists found themselves washing their own dishes in the gloomy loneliness of their homes high up the slope of Mount Royal.

But when the war came, Montreal lost the look of an English island garrison surrounded by a French shanty town. The city grew into a strategic centre for shipping, communications and the military; prosperity returned to the Calvinists, but only at the price of a middle class invasion from which they never really recovered. At war's end, demobilization in Europe brought a huge influx of refugees--not merely the weary Britons looking for a second chance, but also a dynamic hoard of bright-eyed central and east Europeans. The newcomers, adaptable and eager to make good, often had technical skills and or artistic talents.

Hugh MacLennan's Montrcal is the city peopled by the progency of the Old Guard, a class that survives on the economic legacy of the Calvinists yet is strangely separated from them. His characters, unlike their parents, are not blind to the effects of the Depression; they achieve a kind of amateur class-consciousness.

Yet at the core of each of MacLennan's people is a fear that perhaps he abuses his freedom--a suspicion that the Old Guard's standards of morality are rules that one must follow to assure the happy life. And we are left with a sense that no one can escape the guilt of his birth.

MacLennan tells his story from the point of view of an introverted, slightly vain, mildly successful man of public affairs--George Stewart.

Through a series of flash-backs, Stewart recalls, successively, how as a youth he fell in love with the beauteous and fragile Catherine Carey; how the pressure of family and circumstance forced him to give her up; how she flirted around in college, then married a quasi-brutish, brilliant and sensitive medical student, Jerome Martell; how Martell, in his masculine fervor, was unfaithful to her, then left her to fight in Spain; how Martell was officially reported tortured and killed by the Nazis; how he, Stewart, at last marries his Catherine; and how, miraculously, the invincible Martell proved that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated and returned only to find Catherine ready to die from a heart condition she dreaded all her life.

MacLennan's narrative technique is brilliantly planned and assured; his insights into the motivations of his characters are clear and sometimes exciting. Always is evident the sure hand of a facile writer.

But the major value of the book--to this Montrealer, at least-seems to lie in MacLennan's incredible sympathy for his characters and their city. If in advanced middle age they now appear flabby and indifferent as they quietly sip Dewar's Best-Ever-Bottled, they exist, at least. MacLennan has explained how hard knocks made them the way are. Hard knocks always arouse sympathy, particularly if the victims are people you know.