The coldness at the heart of The Enigma of Arrival

The 3rd section - Ivy - of V.S. Naipaul's 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, largely concerns the neglect and decay that has turned the once-prosperous farm and manor in Wiltshire, where VSN's narrator (and VSN for that matter) rented a cottage for about ten years. The ivy, ever encroaching on the once-important farm buildings, is a symbol of the neglect and the transformation - from vibrant enterprise to a locale provide quaint, cheap housing to workers in the nearby superfarms or the nearby towns and to the rare person such as VSN, escaping from the literary life of London. What's really strange about this section is the narrator's obsession w/ his landlord - he always calls him my landlord, rather than by any proper name, perhaps to protect the privacy of a real person, but the effect is to almost make the landlord his personal possession: "my landlord." He is many other things beside, as the narrator informs us. We learn that most such "landlords" pretty much abandon their country property, as farming changes to a more mechanized, large-scale enterprise, and rent out the various manors and outbuildings and take the profits and live elsewhere, perhaps London or Switzerland. But this landlord differs, and prefers to retreat to his childhood home; the narrator tells us that the landlord suffers from "acedia," a medieval notion, which today we'd probably call severe depression. In his ten years on the property, he sees that landlord only twice: once observing him from the back (with a strange fixation on his fat legs!) and the other time passing in a car, when he (thinks) he sees the landlord diffidently waving hello. That's it. OK, so the landlord likes his privacy - but later we learn that the landlord has repeatedly sent the narrator copies of poetry on the theme of India, some of them signed with a broad flourish. Aren't these attempts to strike up a friendship with the writer/narrator/VSN himself? How could VSN, or any normal person, not respond in some way? Sure, VSN wants his privacy as well and specifically rents this property to get away from the literary life, but surely a touch of human kindness, a response to a friendly overture, would be a normal and a correct thing to do, without taking on the obligation of establishing a literary society or correspondence. Seriously, why is this narrator (why is VSN himself?) such an unfeeling man? He's a brilliant writer, full of insight and observation, clear and elegant in his story, but there's a coldness, a meanness even, at the heart of this novel, and other works (tho not all - House for Mister Biswas is free from this misanthropy) as well.